Up to community to flag posts for removal, Facebook and Twitter tell UK parliament.

Google, Twitter, and Facebook continue with their hands-off approach to the content that appears on their sites, even when it comes to extremist posts, MPs and peers were told on Tuesday.

The reason? None of these data-hoarding tech giants want to be labelled as a publisher, because doing so would expose them to strict libel laws here in the UK. However, the companies—keen to appease politicos' concerns about extremist messages being posted online—want to be seen to be doing the right thing.

Step forward Google, which has recently begun a pilot ad campaign in an effort to redirect would-be jihadis to counter-narratives about Islamist extremism. The scheme allows not-for-profit orgs, which want to run campaigns against terrorism, to place free ads on Google's search engine, via an AdWords grant. It hasn't been rolled out globally as yet, though it does seem to be enabled in the UK at least.

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Ars put it to the test simply by tapping the query "join ISIS" into Google's search engine. At the top of the page a sponsored ad appeared for Clarion Project—an NGO that is trying to counter the Islamist extremism narrative.

A Google spokesperson told Ars: "The free Google AdWords Grant program is starting a pilot for a handful of eligible non-profits organisations to run ads against terrorism-related search queries of their choosing."

Google's policy wonk Anthony House revealed details of the pilot scheme on Tuesday afternoon, when he was grilled by members of the cross-party home affairs committee, which has been carrying out an inquiry into the UK government's counter-extremism strategy. It also heard evidence from Twitter and Facebook, during a session that examined whether extremists used social media as a recruiting tool—as alarmed politicians sometimes like to define it. The home affairs panel challenged the Internet companies on whether they were doing enough to prevent their services from being "hijacked" by extremists.

Twitter's UK public policy boss Nick Pickles admitted that the microblogging site sometimes tips off users in Blighty who are under investigation by the police, though he insisted that this only happened on what he described as a "context specific" basis. Facebook and Google confirmed that they don't notify account-holders in the UK if cops are sniffing around their online activities as part of a criminal probe.

"In the UK we don't do it, and—even if we could—we would never do it in respect of counter-terrorism cases," said Facebook's UK policy director Simon Milner. "We would not be tipping someone off," he added. Google's House said it was "jurisdiction-dependent" because—in the US, for example—users have a right to be notified if the police have been investigating their online behaviour.

Enlarge/ Home Secretary Theresa May—speaking in November, 2015—reveals for the first time that British security services have intercepted bulk communications data of UK citizens for years.

Once the committee got into the nitty-gritty of the work carried out by the trio of tech companies to try to muffle extremist posts online, however, the three men were quick to point to the community of users for policing the content. It's up to them to flag material that they deem to be extremist, for example, and only then will Google, Twitter, and Facebook intervene.

When asked by a member of the panel on whether Google—which in 2014 globally removed 14 million videos from YouTube, following complaints from its users—could stand by its claim that it had a "zero-tolerance approach to terrorism", given that the material isn't always flagged quickly enough, thereby remaining online for some time before the search and ad giant takes action, House admitted: "We are keen to think about how we can do a better job."

In November last year, home secretary Theresa May told parliament:

The extremism taskforce has been looking at how social media companies respond to government requests relating to extremist material and hate crimes. We have initiated discussions on that matter and more generally on how extremist material can be taken down from such sites, and we will be progressing that work.

No word yet, however, on whether that particular strategy chimes with right-wing nutjob Donald Trump's desires to prevent ISIS from "using our Internet".